"Why aren't you playing?" he rejoined.

"My husband says I play too badly."

"Oh, play with me! We shall make a good pair."

"Then you must be very good."

"Well, no one can play a hang here, you know. Besides I'm sure
you're all right, really."

"You forget my weight of years."

He opened his blue eyes a little, and laughed. He was, in fact,
astonished to find that she was quite a young woman. Remembering
old Mortimer and the babies, he had thought of her as full
middle-aged. But she was not; nor had she that likeness to a
suet pudding, which his newborn critical faculty cruelly detected
in his old friends, the Vicarage girls.

There was one of them--Maudie--with whom he had flirted in his
holidays; he wondered at that, especially when a relentless
memory told him that Mrs. Mortimer must have been at the
parties where the thing went on. He felt very much older, so
much older that Mrs. Mortimer became at once a contemporary.
Why, then, should she begin, as she now did, to talk to him, in
quasi maternal fashion, about his prospects? Men don't have
prospects, or, anyhow, are spared questionings thereon.

Either from impatience of this topic, or because, after all,